I'm a 100% raid noob. I've never I'm my life done it. Also an ssd newb. I've been building and tinkering with computers half of my life and have never done it. always just used hard drives as a main drive
I just bought two ssds at bestbuy under the impression that I'm going to put them in raid and get some crazy speed out of them.
The motherboard I'm using is an X8DTH-iF. I've never set up raid before so I imagine I just plug in the ssd's and go into the bios and select them to be in raid then?
From reading wikipedia supposedly I want "raid 1" ? Because it just make two of the same disk so if one dies the other takes over?
You will see 0 performance increase if you use raid 1 because the data has to be written to both disks slowing the system down or yielding the same performance of 1 disk. Unless you are writing a load of data to and from the disk for multiple years you are wasting your money. Ssds have a shorter life span but that is relative. Hard disks have physical components that move, if you are reading from the disk reads are free for solid state drives they don't wear down the silicon per say. Reads on a hard drive are not free because the arm still needs to move and it wears down on the component. If you are in an enterprise environment use zfs or raid 6 they are flat out safer if you are in a home environment and are just playing around use raid 0, but know that you cannot change the order of the hard drives nor can you change just 1 drive. With raid 1,3,4,5,6 you can loose disks and still have your data. Rebuilding a raid array is dangerous because you need to read all of the data from the array and then rebuild. Say for instance you have 2 240 gb solid state drives in raid 1 and 1 fails, let's assume that the array was full of 200 gig's of data then when you change your bad disk you need to copy all of that data over again onto the new disk. In raid 5,6 if you loose a disk you can still rebuild eveeything, but if you loose another disk while rebuilding then the process will either be impossible or drastically more difficult.
For your situation if you want to put personal data on the array run raid 1 but you will see just redundancy not speed. If you want speed run raid 0 and put programs on there you are prepared to loose if something goes wrong. For your motherboard go into the bios and under your advanced connection settings select raid from ahci mode and select your sata ports then your raid mode. If you aren't using windows use ZFS it's a software solution that is in my opinion better. I am happy to answer more questions
Raid 1 is mirroring of the drives so that if one dies, the other still has all your data and your good to go. There is no speed improvement over a single drive, but you get the redundancy and safety of data.
If you want more performance than a single drive can provide, raid 0 is your other option. Raid 0 basically stripes the drives and will double the read and write performance. Raid 0 has some draw backs. Firstly, you only get the capacity of one drive for your two. Second, if one drive fails, you lose the contents of both drives. Raid 0 is dangerous and should not be trusted with any important data, ever.
Keep in mind that because of your motherboard being as old as it is, that you will only see approximately half the possible performance out of your drives. The X8DTH-iF is 3GBps off the Intel chipset, and 6GBps off the LSI SAS controller. I'm not too sure if the LSI controller will perform in 3GBps or 6GBps because your using Sata drives. I would only anticipate a 250MBps read from each drive as long as the controller is operating at Sata 2 speeds, which I would bet the LSI will also function as. That means that your limited to either 250MBps read and write in a Raid 1, or 500MBps read and write in a Raid 0, if my bet is right.
I really would caution against putting them in raid 0 if you aren't also keeping a second copy of all your files on a separate drive. Raid 0 is very dangerous, and prone to failures with complete data loss. What drives are they in particular? It would be good to know so I can check the flash type and controller to see if they are good or not.
Use the raid 0 array as a read write cache and working directory basically throw all of your files there and when you are done move the files off use that as a high speed information pool. You won't see any problems but be aware that in 2 or 3 years you might want to purchase 1 new faster nvme ssd and use the old drives for some thing else :)
I would not trust those drives. They're TLC which raises flags. TLC drives are legendary for not withstanding many write cycles without failing. MLC is the standard if you want a drive that is going to last.
I didn't see the second quote. Either way there still is actually a full formula that's considered the "proper" way to keep data safe. One raid protected copy at home, one at moderately far away friend or families place, and one cloud copy.
I wouldn't create a RAID 0 array either, it almost doubles your chances of drive failure, while the speed increase won't be that noticeable I guess.
In terms of data integrity: I think Wendell mentioned something about a factor of 8 being nice, which means if you want to savely store 1MB of data, you are going to need 8MB disk space.
@thecaveman: I was toying around with the idea of purchasing tapes, can you recommend a tape reader?
ok i set up the raid , got windows 7 installed. it worked on the very first boot and i had no display drivers installed or anything , i rebooted the system and now it won't boot into windows. it hard freezes and resets before the little windows logo comes together.
i then have an option for startup repair which i select , it also won't boot into startup repair. it gives me a bluescreen and says the bios is not fully ACPI compliant. which i doubt is true. i set acpi setting to 3.0 and turn anything relating to acpi on and still nothing.